Back in Grade 10 geography class I was presented with a terrifying view
of the world's future. According to a film documenting work by a group
known as the Club of Rome, whose web site helpfully and somewhat disingenuously
tells us is free of any political, ideological or business interest, the
world was rapidly running out of food resources, was becoming so polluted
that life would die off and chaos would soon spread as the competition
for resources reached a fevered pitch.

My classmates took a blasé approach, became concerned but did
nothing or were moved to become fervent environmentalists. I fell into
that middle camp until a fact dawned on me: the movie itself was produced
in the early 1970s and the dire predictions were to become no later than
1980. I saw the movie in the late 1980s. So much for predictions.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Although
the Club of Rome's predictions were - to be charitable - incorrect the
doom and gloom prophecies haven't stopped. The prophets merely extend
their timetables every now and then. The latest is University of Manitoba's
David Tilman, lead author of a study in Science that claims that the changes
produced by world agriculture are no less dangerous than those of global
warming.

The study predicts that unless changes are made, "massive, irreversible
environmental impacts" will be felt by 2050. Although a Green Revolution
has fed the world's growing population, the authors argue that a "Greener"
revolution is needed to rid the world of its reliance on things like pesticide
and fertilizer which they claim are altering the chemistry of water and
air. The future is so dark that report co-author and University of Alberta
ecologist David Schindler stated he's glad he won't be around in 50 years.

"Even at best it's not going to be acceptable to me, so I might
as well be gone," Schindler told the National Post in their April
24 edition. "I think most ecologists on the planet are suffering
from the same thing. They know what the inevitable is. They see it happening
all around them and they see very little being done to prevent it."

Simon (1932-1998)

Tilman and Schindler's passions may be heartfelt, but they don't make
the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus any less discredited. The sad thing
is that iconoclastic Julian Simon effectively silenced the doom and gloom
crowd in 1980 with his book The Ultimate Resource, updated in 1996. Of
course, the idea of future being a lot like today except more expensive
isn't news and it's much sexier to write about a future that journalists
and pundits probably won't alive to see and proved wrong about.

Simon, who famously and successfully bet legendary doom and gloomer Paul
Ehrlich about his predictions, argued that the price of natural resources
throughout human history had been declining, evidence of greater abundance
and not scarcity. He also showed that over time humanity was becoming
cleaner and not dirtier and that the growth in population - which obviously
drives increased agriculture - was due to a global reduction in infant
mortality rates and longer life expectancy, or as Simon stated, "trends
[which] are to be celebrated, not lamented."

Over hundreds of articles and several books Simon built an impenetrable
case that life is getting better on earth because the planet's ultimate
resource wasn't its crop yields or cleanliness but rather its people.
"Human beings," Simon once wrote, "are not just more mouths
to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative
solutions to man's problems, thus leaving us better off over the long
run." Human knowledge allows us to produce more finished products
out of fewer raw materials, with the result that natural resources are
becoming more available and the air and water in developed nations becoming
cleaner. Agriculture isn't the problem, but a lack of economic freedom.

The world does face challenges and we would be blind if we ignored that
fact. People like Tilman and Schindler, however, believe that the world
is a zero sum game. If there are more people, they necessarily create
more pollution. Simon's argument, which has been proved right time and
time again, in the words of Ben Wattenberg, "was that natural resources
are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of
man, an always renewable resource."

All resources except optimism and human ingenuity apparently.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.

Other related articles: (open in a new window)

The
sanction of the victim by Tom DeWeese (April 16, 2001)
Why do environmentalists get away with the evil that they do? Tom DeWeese
says it's because you let them

I
love Starbucks a latte by Aaron Lukas (March 26, 2001)
Move away from the coffee! Aaron Lukas checks out a protest in Washington,
D.C. against Starbucks and biotechnology and a counterprotest aimed
back at them